J. Maarten Troost talks South Pacific travel at Yahoo! News

This week in my Yahoo! News “Traveling Light” column, I review J. Maarten Troost’s new travel book, Getting Stoned With Savages, and interview the author about travel in the South Pacific. Troost’s first book, The Sex Lives of Cannibals, is among my all-time favorite travel-humor tomes, and his South Pacific sequel is similar in some ways, yet different in others:

Life in the easygoing Vanuatuan capital city of Port Vila turns out to be much more comfortable than Kiribati, but Troost manages to explore the quirks and idiosyncrasies of this new island nation — from spectacularly corrupt local officials, to the foul-tasting (yet strangely addictive) intoxicant kava, to the dangers of sharks, earthquakes, and volcanoes. Later, when he and Sylvia move on to Fiji for the birth of their son, Troost has humorous encounters with transvestite hookers, enthusiastic rugby fans, and backyard mudslides.

A fast and entertaining read, Savages nonetheless suffers a bit as a sequel, as it doesn’t quite capture the charm and energy that distinguished Cannibals. A lot of this has to do with the relative comfort of the author’s new destinations — and Troost acknowledges this by the end of his tale. “In Fiji, as in Vanuatu, we were expatriates,” he writes. “When we’d lived in Kiribati…we experienced the island much as the I-Kiribati did. Partly, of course, this was because there was no other way to experience it. The isolation was absolute; the deprivation universal.” By contrast, his well-appointed expatriate stint in Vanuatu and Fiji is a bit lacking in cross-cultural intimacy. Still, Troost manages to teach us about the basics about life in these far-flung places while giving us plenty of laughs along the way.

In the Q&A, Troost points out that the South Pacific is home to off-the-beaten path travel in the truest sense:

Whenever I travel in the South Pacific, I feel like I’ve left the planet. The islands are faraway, hard to get to, and the continental world soon feels like nothing more than a distant dream. It’s a good place to just disappear for a while. If I were looking for a beach vacation, I probably wouldn’t go any further than Hawaii. But if I were looking to just fall off the map for a while, there’s nothing quite like the islands of the South Pacific. Each is its own world.

And where should one start when exploring the islands of the South Pacific? Troost recommends Fiji:

It’s the hub of the Pacific. Most of the region’s airlines fly to Fiji, so if you’re traveling to more than one country in the South Pacific, Fiji is a natural place to start. Plus, it’s a great place for travelers. You can pretty much find whatever you’re looking for in the South Pacific in Fiji itself – beaches, diving, trekking, a strong indigenous culture – and it’s the most affordable country in the region.

Full Troost book review and interview online here.